~metafilter | Bookmarks (1009)

A recent post on Metatalk discusses posts about birds. Ergo, have you seen, heard, or encountered any comment-worthy birds (keep it clean) recently or in the past? Perhaps hopping or waddling birds, birds which say "pew", some clever magpies, some parakeets, a lovely pair of boobies or just any birds ... Or write about whatever is on your mind, in your heart, on your...

Among corporate America's most persistent shareholder activists are 80 nuns in a monastery outside Kansas City. [The Associated Press]The Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica rebut Harrison Butker as no one else could [Kansas City Star]

To Anyone Who Ever Asks is a widely lauded biography by Howard Fishman of musician Connie Converse, which came out last year. Not everyone liked it, with dissenting voices including her nephew and Joyce Kittenplan on her Substack The Ambiguities [archive link]. Inspired by these reviews, and their own frustrations with the biography, folklorists and musicians Sophie Abramowitz, Sarah Bachman and Emily Hilliard started...

A nearly two-decade study of birds living in Melbourne's Albert Park has revealed surprising relationship patterns between black swans.

It sits in one of the planet's newest landscapes, the Gen X-era crater of Mount St. Helens, born out of the mountain's May 18, 1980, eruption. Although the cataclysm beheaded the summit and wiped out 70% of the volcano's glaciers, it also created an unexpectedly ideal location (high, steep surrounding walls that reduce sunlight and generate abundant rockfalls and avalanches, and decent annual snow...

Telegram messaging app CEO arrested in France (Al Jazeera, NYT gift, Le Monde, France 24, BBC, Guardian) French investigators had issued a warrant for Durov's arrest as part of an inquiry into allegations of fraud, drug trafficking, organised crime, promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying. Russia's embassy in France has demanded consular access to the 39-year-old Franco-Russian billionaire.

"19th century French printmaker and painter Adolphe Appian trained at a small specialized art school in his home town of Lyon, and worked for a time as a graphic designer." This is a recent post from Charley Parker's excellent Lines and Colors blog. I receive it via RSS, and the entries are always a pleasure. They have introduced me to more interesting-but-not-especially-famous artists than...

You could call it a situationist spectacle, a piece of rolling performance art or a collective satire [guardian]situationism spectacular [wiki2]

I had spent countless nights in the woods consciously and subconsciously adjusting my relationship to danger: preparing for it, tempering it, overthinking it, underthinking it, ignoring it. But no matter how desensitized we had become, the more time spent in the woods, the more of a numbers game you play with injury, weather, wildlife, exposure. Just because you don't recognize the danger, it doesn't...

Dr Angela Collier, a Star Trek fan, eviscerates 'Star Trek: Picard' over the course of nearly 4 hours, which is a long run-time but it seems to fly by much faster and in a more entertaining way, than an episode of the aforementioned 'Picard' - How Star Trek: Picard Ruins Star Trek. Dr Collier has created a stellar catalog of informative (and much shorter)...

"Jesus himself did it," he said. "Nobody killed anybody. I did nothing." Alexis Okeowo investigates the story of Paul Mackenzie, a Kenyan religious leader charged with the deaths of more then 400 people. (SLNY) (cw: mass murder, bodily suffering, cruelty to children, sexual violence)

It's Not Too Late: A Lifetime Measured by Jeff Buckley's "Grace." August 15th, 1994 marked the debut of singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley's only full studio album. 30 years on, Olivia Abercrombie talks of the influence of that album on her life.Speaking for myself, and only myself, Jeff Buckley's death was my Significant Alternative Music Death. His passing came on the heels of a femicide my...

The first woman to make her living from painting captured herself and other women in the ways they wished to be perceived. Ed Simon for Hyperallergic (Editorial comment: the Cassat of late 1500s Bologna).

There's almost no cost for scientific fraud. Thinking about whether legal punishment would be a good idea.

The actual monetary system is a politically anchored multi-layered web of IOUs, in different forms, that holds the so-called economic realm together. Analysing the separate elements of that foundation as if they were free-floating commodities subject to monetary cost considerations (that the foundation itself underpins) is delusional on multiple fronts. Not only does the foundation get weakened if you remove cash, but we incur...

"Memories. You're talking about memories." User @vga256@dialup.cafe posted about a mesmerizing piece of Internet art history over on Mastodon, and wrote about the recovery and safeguard of "Blade Runner: the Aquarel Edition" on the Internet Archive."twelve years ago, a painter by the name of anders ramsell painted 12,597 aquarelle paintings of blade runner, shot by shot, of the entire film edited down to ~35...

These crabs congregate on Australia's shores in a spectacular fashion but their story remains a mystery. Faced with an enduring ocean mystery and next to no money, researchers studying thousands of crabs on Australia's southern coast have turned to the public for help.

My fellow worms and Americans It is I, your friend, the worm who ate part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s brain, then died.As a creature who seeks only to gorge myself willy-nilly on whatever life offers without concern for what devastation I leave in my wake, I have long admired Donald Trump's way of doing things. To live off the production of others in...

Hank Green (who has a long-standing (nearly seminal) relationship with both Google and Youtube [even before youtube was eaten by google]) has some things to say about data-mining and AI practices, especially as they pertain to those outfits.

"Shining an ultraviolet light over the stamps in the set of eight reveals a hidden image. The Owlbear, Gelatinous Cube, Mind Flayer and Displacer Beast stamps show the stylized dragon ampersand from the Dungeons & Dragons logo. A dragon head appears on the Red Dragon stamp, and the Vecna stamp shows a skull. The Mimic and Beholder stamps show different images of each of...

Monotypes have been around for a long time and have been invented and re-invented several times. https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2016/05/27/lasting-impressions-the-monotype-medium-from-edgar-degas-to-elizabeth-peyton/ Currently they're undergoing a revival of sorts thanks to the Gel Plate which has made it very easy for the beginner (like me!) to make their own prints and papers.If you haven't been exposed to Gel Plates yet, they're similar to traditional monotype plates made of Gelatin...

Like the Enigma, the HX-63 was an electromechanical cipher system known as a rotor machine. It was the only electromechanical rotor machine ever built by CAG, and it was much more advanced and secure than even the famous Enigmas. In fact, it was arguably the most secure rotor machine ever built. I longed to get my hands on one, but I doubted I ever...

Black Ox Orkestar performs their song Viderkol (Echos) at the Montreal Jewish Museum.In the early/mid 2000s members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mount Zion released two albums as Black Ox Orkestar. The music took the post-rock of GY!BE and SMZ and infused the sounds of traditional Jewish folk music and Klezmer. A few years ago (unbeknownst to me) they released a...

ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) has successfully completed a world-first lunar-Earth flyby, using the gravity of Earth to send it Venus-bound, on a shortcut to Jupiter through the inner Solar System. The closest approach to the Moon was at 23:15 CEST (21:15 UTC) on 19 August, guiding Juice towards a closest approach to Earth just over 24 hours later at 23:56 CEST (21:56...